Monday, 22 May 2017

ARNALDUR INDRIDASON'S SHADOW DISTRICT

When the body of a
woman is discovered in wartime Reykjavik's 'shadow district',
suspicion falls on American soldiers, who have brought changes to the
social life of the Icelandic capital. So the investigation is handled
in tandem, by an Iceland cop, Flovent, and an American MP named
Thorson, a Canadian solider seconded to the Americans because he
actually speaks Icelandic. Murder investigation is literally a new
thing for the Icelandic police, and they are still feeling their way
around an investigation; Thorson, of course, is a soldier not a
detective.

In modern Reykavik,
a 90 year old man is found dead in his bed. A few days later, when an
autopsy reveals he was suffocated, and the police investigate, all
they find are some cuttings from that murder case in World War II. At
which point Konrad, a retired police detective, is asked by his
former colleague Marta to, unofficially, take a look.

The underlying theme
behind Arnaldur Indridason's novels, explicit in some like his first
in English, Jar City,
has always been the uneasy conflict between traditional Iceland, a
society sealed almost hermetically for centuries, and modern Iceland.
His detective Erlendur loves to eat horse head; his colleague
Sigurdur Oli loves all things American. Indridason wrote a
stand-alone contemporary thriller involving Americans and Nazi bomber
lost in 1945; the cold war figures in Draining Lake. World
War II was the catalyst for this change, and that is the engine which
powers this exceptional story, as its two strands grow closer and
intertwine. And the connections are not what might at first appear to be.

The Shadow District takes us back to a society that seems more like Ibsen, if not
Dickens, than the modern Iceland in which Erlendur worked, and it's
significant that Konrad is a retired cop, someone who still has a
foot in the past. It's not even that he is a typical Scandi
'depressive detective' the way Erlendur was so brilliantly drawn.
He's a quiet old man, trying to connect the past and the present.
There's more than a hint of Conrad too in the way the story plays
out, as it very quietly becomes more and more dark, with twists and
shocks, as well as the sadness of the years that passed between crime
and punishment. Indridson is easily the finest of the contemporary
Nordic crime writers, and though the label 'Nordic Noir' is slapped
on anything written north of Schleswig-Holstein, this comes closer
than most to living up to it. At any rate, it's one of the finest
crime novels of this or any year.